Remembering the Beatons
Loose Cannon Boost 1.19.22
In the fall of 1970, my good friend Tom Carter and I pointed his old VW bus northeast for a road trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Tom was a senior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and I had just crashed in with him and his roommate after dropping out of journalism grad school at Northwestern University. I was clueless as to what was next in the quickly advancing deadline towards grown-up life and all I knew is that moving back to my family home in Salt Lake City was another “giving up” in a long history of giving up on things.
Tom and I have played music and have been close friends since our high school days in Utah. As we sipped socially distanced coffee this past weekend, we reminisced about that trip over fifty years ago and he asked me, “Why did we go to Nova Scotia?”
We looked at each other perplexed. We had no contacts there, nor a specific destination in mind. All we could remember is that we were crazy for all kinds of old-time fiddle music. Our friend Skip Gorman had started listening to recordings of Angus Chisholm and Winston Scotty Fitzgerald, Cape Breton fiddlers who played the Scottish music in a style unique to that area. We had also heard that people there still spoke Gaelic as their first language. It looked like a beautiful place. I guess that was enough of a reason for the trip but it didn’t quite answer the question.
I don’t remember much about the 800-mile drive from Providence except that once we had crossed the causeway onto Cape Breton, things felt different. We studied the map and continued north along the coast towards a town called Inverness. That sounded pretty Scottish.
Somehow we ended up on a remote road in front of an old cottage. We were lost. In fact, being lost seemed to be our usual state. A woman answered the door and invited us in. Then she invited us to stay. Mrs. Isabelle Kennedy, who was also known locally as the big nurse, became our advocate and helped us find fiddlers. It was through her that we met the Beaton family who lived on a on the edge of the sea in a place called Broad Cove Marsh.
When we showed up at the Beaton’s door, we were greeted by seven kids, their parents, John Allan and Marjorie, and John Allan’s bachelor brother, Alex all living in a two-story frame house on a small farm. It was a stunningly beautiful setting, and if life there was hard it didn’t show. We were welcomed into their home and into a world that perfectly fit our romantic notions of rural life. I think Tom and I would have hired on as farm hands and thrown in the towel on the rest of our lives. At that time a person could purchase a small farm on the coast of Cape Breton for a couple thousand dollars. I remember Tom and I considered it and then realized how unprepared we were to make that kind of full turn on our upbringing and education – not to mention that we knew nothing about farming itself.
We had our instruments and that seemed to be enough of a calling card for a music party. I hauled in my big Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder and from there it all came naturally. After that first night we came back for another night’s music and talk and by the end of the trip we knew we would return. Tom and I made a second trip during the next spring, bringing along one of Tom’s professors, Robert Jay. We loved that we were introduced as the Beaton’s friends. I made another trip the next year with my cousins then Tom made final visit in August of 1979. But after that we lost touch with the family and with Nova Scotia. That is -- until this past weekend.
Years ago Tom donated his fieldwork sound recordings to Brown University, including the reel-to-reel tapes we had made in Cape Breton. He had gone on to earn advanced degrees in folklore and had a career as a professor of architectural history at the University of Utah. I too became a folklorist but not in academia. We sort of forgot about the Cape Breton excursions, until one of our friends, Gerald Pocius, retired from teaching at Memorial University in St. John’s Newfoundland and moved over to Cape Breton. Jerry and Tom were talking about places to fish and Jerry mentioned driving along the west coast and through Mabou. The name brought back memories of the Beatons, and arrangements were made to send Tom and Hal’s recordings to the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University (Beaton is a common surname in Cape Breton). The music had come full circle.
Why did we go to Cape Breton?
So this gets us back to the question Tom asked me as we sipped coffee in his living room last weekend. Why did we go?
I don’t know why we spent our precious fall break going into the unknown but we decided to turn to the cold north hunting for fiddlers. I supose fall is hunting season and I’m sure the urge to hunt and gather was strong in both of us. After all, we are both curious people and for us this trip in search of fiddlers to Cape Breton was our first real folklore fieldwork trip. We had no idea at the time it would lead to a profession for me making hundreds of recordings and for Tom drawing hundreds of old buildings over the years.
But I will propose other underlying reasons for what prompted us to travel to Nova Scotia. From an early age I harbored a romantic notion, sort of a Paradise lost, vision of my life and folk artistry. The mountain music of Appalachia hit me hard when I was barely a teen. I was one of those who sensed that the world had gone awry and that in a quest for comfort and security our family, our community, our nation, had lost touch with something vital. It was something of that vitality—the search for authenticity -- that I heard in the music.
Both Tom and I were big fans of the New Lost City Ramblers. We later became friends with them but as teens, while others worshipped the Rolling Stones, we worshipped archaic folk music. Mike Seeger, a leader of the New Lost City Ramblers, spoke of folk culture as “a true vine,” rooted so deeply that mass media – radio, phonograph records, and other disruptive forces – scarcely disturbed it. Tom and I found this metaphorical vine in Cape Breton, a place where it had not been severed by the modern world.
Some, like respected music writer Tod Gioia call this version of culture a “Primitivist Myth.” Never the less, I admit to being a romantic when it comes to music. The hard edge of reality is prevalent in too many other parts of my life. It’s like a good love song. If that song can help you fall in love again, does anything else matter?
The Beaton family, in all their kindness, welcomed us into their lives. Like many big families with lots of kids who live on a foundation of ever-shifting chaos, they accepted the world as it unfolded and we entered part of that unfolding. They lived by the old world value that you do not turn the stranger out, and they welcomed us with open arms.
Sometimes memory seems to wield a strange, manifesting magic. The very day that Tom and I met for coffee and started reminiscing about our time in Cape Breton, we both got e-mails from Anne Beaton. She is the little girl laughing uproariously in the photo at the top of this letter. Her brother, Dougie, now runs the farm and the Beaton Institute contacted him when they received tapes of the music we recorded so many years ago. Dougie now has copies for the family, and Anne reached out to us, remembering the day we took the photo:
I think you must have sent us a serious one that we kept in a frame for a long time. Meanwhile that day you took the picture, what the girls - Josie, Joan, and me - REALLY wanted was a picture of you three [we had brought a professor friend with us on that trip] so we could show our girlfriends at school these handsome university guys who had been coming by our house for a couple of evenings to play and listen to music.”
She went on to say, “We never, ever forgot the ‘Utah Boys.’ And I say back to the Beaton family, “We never ever, forgot the Beatons.” God Bless.
Postscript from Tom Carter
In all, I made three visits to the Beatons that year, my senior year in college. But these trips, and another I made to record an old Vermont fiddler, proved more beneficial than anything I could have done in school. They connected me, as they did Hal, with the life I hoped to have, the pre-modern one that surrounded the old music that we embraced so dearly. It was a vicarious attachment to be sure. Back to the land was an idea not a reality. We would have quickly starved. But fieldwork, visiting people who lived that life, was a good deal easier. And it became what I—what we, Hal and I—did from that time on. I worked on buildings rather than with musicians, but it was really the same thing. In so many ways I have the Beatons to thank for making it all possible, inviting us in and sharing their music, food, stories, and work with us. If I can return to that farm and be with those people again—and I hope to do it soon-it would complete my own circle.
I really enjoyed reading this story about Nova Scotia. My family knows the Beaton's, personally. My parents inherited a farm in Nova Scotia, which was sold many years ago. Living in the US, we had loved to visit the farm when we were kids. Our last name was Gillis. My Father's name was Angus William Gillis. The farm used to be in Cape Breton, Inverness. We used to love to go to my Grandmother's house, here in the States, and listen to the downhome music, as you are talking about, that my Father had grown up with. We as kids, were amazed as the kindness of neighbors and just how lovely Nova Scotia was. It is a very fond memory. Thanks for sharing this story!
Beautiful article. I love your description of your attraction to folk music and folklife. That longing for “vitality” and “authenticity” certainly resonates with me. Just a few days ago Cliff and I were reminiscing about our 1976 trek back to see the Beatons in his avocado-green Pinto. We pulled into Inverness in the late afternoon and called John Allan on a pay phone. I told him who we were, that we were friends of you guys from Utah, and that we wondered if there might be a time to get together with them to play and possibly record some music. John Allan said, “ I don’t know- I’m pretty busy. How about half an hour?”